Day 8 – Tongues of Fire Were Prophesied

Ascension to Pentecost – Season of Waiting

Christ is ascended! Glorify Him!

“The prophets saw the Spirit from afar and longed for what they could not yet receive. We who have received the gift they foresaw ought to tremble at the grace given to us.” – St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on the Church, Hymn 26

“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” – Joel 2:28

We are one day from Pentecost.

The disciples in the Upper Room have been praying for eight days. They have restored the Twelve. They have held together in one accord, through the dry moments and the luminous ones, through the nights when the waiting felt like abundance and the nights when it felt like absence. Mary has been among them, holding the intercessory centre of the community with the faith of one who has already passed through everything that the rest of them still fear.

And somewhere in those eight days, I imagine them doing something else. Something that their tradition had always done in the face of uncertainty, in the face of promise, in the face of waiting for what God had said He would do but had not yet done.

They opened the Scriptures.

The Scriptures as a Map of What Is Coming

We know they were reading the Scriptures in those days, because Peter had already demonstrated it in the election of Matthias. He had opened the Psalms and found there the prophetic warrant for what the community needed to do. And this was not an isolated act of individual biblical interpretation. It was the natural expression of a community that had been formed, through three years of following Jesus, to read the whole of the Old Testament as a living voice speaking into the present action of God.

Luke tells us that after the Resurrection, Jesus had opened the Scriptures to the disciples and shown them how the whole of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms bore witness to what had happened and to what was still to come (Luke 24:44-45). He had given them a hermeneutical key, a way of reading the Scriptures that unlocked their prophetic depth and allowed the community to navigate the present moment by the light of the accumulated witness of Israel’s history with God.

The disciples in the Upper Room were using that key. They were reading Joel and Isaiah and Ezekiel not as interesting ancient documents but as present words, spoken by the Spirit who had inspired them and who was about to be poured out. They were reading the Scriptures the way that Ephrem the Syrian would later describe: not as investigators seeking to master the text, but as worshippers allowing the text to master them, to shape them, to prepare them for what was coming.¹

Joel: The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh

The most directly relevant prophetic text for the Upper Room community was almost certainly Joel 2:28-32, the passage that Peter would quote in full on the morning of Pentecost itself (Acts 2:17-21). It is worth sitting with it carefully, because it is one of the most radical statements in the entire Old Testament.

“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit.”

The radicalism of this passage is easy to miss if we read it from within a tradition that has already absorbed its implications. In the context of the Old Testament, the Spirit was understood as falling upon particular people at particular times for particular purposes. The Spirit came upon the judges to deliver Israel in battle. The Spirit came upon the prophets to give them the word of the Lord. The Spirit came upon the kings at their anointing. In every case, the Spirit’s coming was selective, occasional, and functional. It came to specific people, for specific tasks, and could be withdrawn.

Joel’s promise blows all of that apart. All flesh. Sons and daughters. Old and young. Male and female servants. Every boundary that the ancient world used to determine who was spiritually significant and who was not is, in this single oracle, dissolved. The Spirit is to be poured out with a generosity that has no precedent in the Old Testament, upon people of every age, every gender, every social status, without distinction.

The disciples in the Upper Room, reading these words in the light of what Jesus had promised in the Farewell Discourse, would have begun to understand the scope of what was coming. This was not a gift for the Twelve. It was not even a gift for the one hundred and twenty. It was a gift for all flesh. And they, gathered in this room, were the first recipients of a generosity that was intended, ultimately, to reach every human person who would ever live.

Isaiah: The Spirit Resting on the Shoot of Jesse

Isaiah’s vision of the Spirit is woven through multiple chapters of his prophecy, but the most concentrated treatment is in Isaiah 11:1-3, the vision of the shoot that would spring from the stump of Jesse and upon whom the Spirit of the Lord would rest.

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him, the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord.”

For the disciples in the Upper Room, this passage had already been fulfilled in Christ. He was the shoot from Jesse’s stump, the branch that had borne fruit in ways that exceeded anything the prophet could have imagined. The sevenfold gift of the Spirit described by Isaiah rested upon Jesus in its fullness. And He had promised that the same Spirit who rested upon Him would be given to them.

St. Ephrem the Syrian, drawing on this Isaianic vision in his hymns, understands the Pentecost gift as the extension of the Spirit’s anointing from the Head to the members of the Body. What rested upon Christ at His baptism in the Jordan now comes to rest upon the whole Church. The Body receives what the Head has always carried. The members are anointed with the same Spirit that anointed the One into Whose name they were baptised.

For the Malankara Orthodox faithful, this Isaianic theology of the Spirit has a direct liturgical expression in the rite of Chrismation, the anointing with the Holy Myron that follows baptism in our tradition. The newly baptised person is anointed as Christ was anointed, sharing in the same Spirit that rested upon the shoot of Jesse. Every chrismation is a personal Pentecost, a personal reception of the prophetic gift that Joel foresaw and Isaiah described.²³

Ezekiel: The Valley of Dry Bones

Of all the Old Testament passages that the Upper Room community might have opened during those nine days of waiting, the one I find most theologically evocative for the days between Ascension and Pentecost is Ezekiel 37, the vision of the valley of dry bones.

Ezekiel is taken in the Spirit to a valley filled with bones. Dry bones. Very dry. The bones of Israel in exile, stripped of everything, apparently beyond all hope of restoration. And then the Word of the Lord comes: can these bones live? And Ezekiel, wisely, gives the only honest answer: Lord God, you know.

And then comes the command: prophesy to these bones. And Ezekiel prophesies. And there is a noise, a rattling, and the bones come together, bone to its bone. And sinew comes upon them, and flesh covers them. But there is no breath in them. And then the command comes again: prophesy to the breath, the ruach, the wind. And Ezekiel prophesies to the wind. And the breath comes, from the four winds, and the slain live, and stand upon their feet, an exceedingly great army.

This is one of the most dramatic visions in the entire Hebrew Bible. And it is also, I would suggest, the most precise prophetic image of what was about to happen on the morning of Pentecost.

The disciples in the Upper Room were, in a real sense, a valley of dry bones. Not because they lacked faith or love or the genuine experience of the Risen Lord. But because they were, as yet, the Body of Christ without the animating breath. The bones had come together, the flesh and sinew were in place, the structure of the Church was assembled. What had not yet come was the breath. The Ruha. The wind from the four corners. The breath of God that would make of these assembled believers an exceedingly great army, capable of going to the ends of the earth.⁴

On Pentecost morning, when the sound comes from heaven as a rushing mighty wind, filling the whole house where they were sitting, it is Ezekiel 37 being fulfilled in real time. The breath is coming. The valley of dry bones is stirring. The exceedingly great army is rising to its feet.

Reading the Scriptures as the Upper Room Read Them

The Antiochene exegetical tradition, which is the tradition of scriptural interpretation that our Syriac heritage carries, has always understood the Old Testament as a living voice rather than a closed archive. The types and symbols scattered through the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings are not decorative literary features. They are the Spirit’s own preparation of the ground, laid down centuries in advance, for the events that would unfold in the fullness of time.

This understanding shapes the lectionary of the Malankara Orthodox Qurbana. The Old Testament readings appointed for the Sunday liturgy are not there simply for historical interest or devotional variety. They are placed there because the community is meant to hear them as the Upper Room community heard them: as present words, as prophetic light falling on the gathered assembly, illuminating what the Spirit is doing now in the community that gathers in the name of the Risen Lord.

The Seeking Theosis blog, rooted as it is in the Syriac patristic tradition, has always understood this about Scripture. The reflections in this nine-day series have drawn consistently on the Old Testament not as background colour but as theological bedrock, as the living witness of the Spirit who was always moving, always preparing, always pointing toward what would be fully revealed in Christ and in the gift of the Paraclete.

Today’s invitation, on this eighth day of waiting, one day from Pentecost, is to open the Scriptures as the Upper Room community opened them. Not to master them. Not to extract information from them. To sit with Joel and Isaiah and Ezekiel as those who are, right now, living inside the promise they described. To hear the voice of the Spirit speaking through these ancient words as a present word, addressed to this community, in this moment, preparing us for whatever fire is being readied on the other side of tomorrow.

The Scriptures and the Spirit Together

There is a final theological point that the Syriac tradition holds with particular clarity, and which I want to name explicitly before we close today’s reflection.

Scripture and Spirit are never separated in the Syriac theological tradition. The Spirit who inspired the prophets is the same Spirit who illumines the reader. The Spirit who spoke through Joel and Isaiah and Ezekiel is the same Spirit who is poured out on the community that reads them with faith. This means that the reading of Scripture is never a merely intellectual exercise. It is a pneumatic one. It is an act in which the Spirit who gave the word meets the Spirit who dwells in the gathered community, and something happens that exceeds what either the text or the reader could produce alone.

Ephrem the Syrian understood this profoundly. In his Commentary on the Diatessaron he writes about Scripture as a mirror in which the attentive reader sees not just the text but themselves, and not just themselves but God. The Scripture does not merely inform. It transforms. It does to the reader what the prophets said the Spirit would do: it breathes life into dry bones, it pours grace upon all flesh, it makes the shoot of Jesse visible in the community that has been grafted into His vine.⁵

One more day. The Spirit who inspired these words is the same Spirit who is coming tomorrow.

For Reflection

When we read the Old Testament prophets, do we hear them as speaking into the present life of our community, or as historical documents from a distant past? What would it change if we began to read them as the Upper Room community read them?
Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones is an uncomfortable image. Are there areas of our own lives, or our community’s life, that honestly resemble that valley? Can we bring those areas before the breath of the Spirit today?
The Syriac tradition holds that Scripture and Spirit are never separated. What does it mean for your daily reading of Scripture to understand it as a pneumatic act, one in which the same Spirit who inspired the text meets you in the reading?

A Closing Prayer

Lord, You gave us the Scriptures as a lamp for our feet and a light for our path. You breathed Your Spirit into the prophets so that they might speak, centuries in advance, of what You were preparing to do. And You gave us, in the Upper Room community, the model of how to read those Scriptures: not as investigators seeking to master the text, but as worshippers allowing the text to speak, to shape, to prepare. Open our ears today to hear Joel and Isaiah and Ezekiel as present words, addressed to us, now. Let the vision of the valley of dry bones call us to honesty about what in us still needs the breath of life. Let the promise of the Spirit poured out on all flesh fill us with the immensity of what You are offering. And let the shoot of Jesse, upon whom the Spirit rested in its fullness, draw us deeper into the anointing we received in our baptism and chrismation. One more day. Come, Holy Spirit.

Through the intercessions of the holy prophets and all the saints, have mercy on us.

Amen.

Day 8 of 9 reflections for the days between the Feast of the Ascension and the Feast of Pentecost. Come, Holy Spirit.

Patristic References

St. Ephrem the Syrian Hymns on the Church. The passage on the prophets seeing the Spirit from afar draws on Ephrem’s consistent typological understanding of the prophetic witness. ↩︎
On Isaiah 11 and the Sevenfold Gift of the Spirit – Brock, Sebastian P. The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition. Chapter 5 addresses the Isaianic theology of the Spirit’s anointing and its connection to the Syriac baptismal and chrismation rites. ↩︎
Kollamparampil, Thomas. Salvation in Christ according to Jacob of Serugh. Addresses the Isaianic shoot of Jesse typology within the Syriac soteriological tradition. ↩︎
On Ezekiel 37 and Pentecost – Levison, John R. Filled with the Spirit. Chapter 4 addresses the breath of God in Ezekiel 37 within the broader pneumatological tradition and its connection to New Testament Pentecost theology. ↩︎
Saint Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron. Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement 2. The passage on Scripture as mirror draws on Ephrem’s reflective hermeneutic developed throughout this commentary. ↩︎

Day 8 – Tongues of Fire Were Prophesied

Ascension to Pentecost – Season of Waiting